[lbo-talk] the right's devolution

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 9 13:30:50 PDT 2009


On Mar 9, 2009, at 4:21 PM, SA wrote:


> Speaking of braindead right-wingers, Jonah Goldberg once actually
> said something that was pretty plausible on this score. He said
> conservatives all have a common corpus of Great Classic Works of
> conservative political philosophy, like the ones you mention above,
> whereas liberals or "progressives" have nothing like that. Who is
> the great thinker of American liberalism? I mean that contemporary
> liberals actually recognize and cite as a maître à penser of their
> own?

Arthur Schlesinger? Paul Krugman? A little further left, Naomi Klein?

But as Irving Kristol once put it: "American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left....If you read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."

Doug



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